The price of stifling dissent is not only dishonesty, itâs self-harming incompetence
The governments and media elites of the West pride themselves on providing and promoting freedom of thought, opinion, and debate.
Together with a selective feminism that easily sacrifices the women of, say, Libya, Iraq, and Palestine, and a very odd understanding of democracy that includes the use of miscounts and lawfare to shape elections, their claim to a superior public sphere features among those values routinely invoked to justify Western regime change aggression.
But the Western claim to superior freedom of mind, information, and discussion doesn’t just serve as a pretext for subversion, interference, and violence elsewhere. It is also extremely weak (to put it very politely) on its own terms and at home.
Whoever has followed, for instance, the manner in which have (not) been covering the knows that Western establishment media are ruthless instruments of unaccountable and immoral power and geopolitics, and have no moral or intellectual inhibitions.
While a genocide is a particularly crass example of the West’s great capacity for Orwellian manipulation, it would be easy to enumerate further instances, including the mendacious justification of brutal and devastating wars against , Afghanistan, and Libya, to name a few.
A key element in these campaigns of deliberate bias, omission, misinformation, and, in effect, disinformation is the use of credentialed experts, who lend their apparent authority to mainstream, that is, government and elite narratives. But, of course, not just any experts. Western expertise is now carefully cultivated and pruned to fit what the establishment wants its populations to hear and believe.
As a result, throughout the West and, in particular, the EU, we have been witnessing a severe narrowing of the opinion spectrum that citizens are permitted to even access, much less to have a debate about.
One side of this curbing operation is viciously repressive: Those experts daring to think differently and speak about it in public . Using the cover of sanctions, of following no acceptable standards of evidence and of not granting their victims any hearing, legal process, or defense.
Once upon a time, in East Germany, a drab authoritarian-socialist place, the dreaded Stasi secret police called this method , literally disintegration. Instead of jailing dissidents, their social and professional lives – and livelihoods – were systematically disrupted and, in effect, destroyed. Between the dour authoritarian-socialists of the old Cold War and the high-handed EU radical-centrist extremists of the new ‘values’ crusade, les extrêmes se touchent, as they used to say.
The expectable psychological consequences of this repression – anxiety, stress, and trauma – are, of course, not a by-product of the procedure but its real core aim. Obviously, every independent voice silenced by arbitrary assault is meant to serve as a deterrent to terrorize many others into submission. All of it happens without legal due process and by an unaccountable bureaucracy hiding behind anonymity. Welcome to the EU, 2025 ‘values’ edition. Rule of law was yesterday (if ever).
The other side of the great curbing and shaping of the permitted spectrum of opinion, information, and debate consists of rewarding and promoting. As under Stalin (if less bloodily), cutting down and raising up are two prongs of the same authoritarian strategy of control. Those experts who say what the powers-that-be like to hear make (materially) gratifying careers. More importantly, the mainstream media, with television in the lead, draw on them, and almost exclusively on them, for interviews, quotes for articles, news appearances, and, crucially, to fill TV studio seats for influential primetime talk shows.
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